Ghosts & the FCC

This feels like a mashup piece. When I say the dead have risen, hiding amongst us, what comes to mind? If you said Halloween, you’d of course be wrong. Every day in 2017 has news that sounds as if it is straight out of a horror author’s playbook – but no, I’m not taking about Halloween, I’m talking about the FCC.

A short TL;DR of my past posts concerning the FCC: The current chairman – human equivalent of an invasive specious, Ajit Pai – is hellbent to overrule Net Neutrality. He is a former Telecom industry executive and doesn’t even bother to hide the obvious nature of his corruption.

Though long known about on the correct subreddits, an article has just come out about the use of fraudulent comments and posts on the FCC’s very own website in support of the systematic dismantling of Net Neutrality. If you go on the FCC’s site, you can see famously fake public comments such as this:

“The FCC’s Net Neutrality rules were written in the Obama White House by political staff and Tech Industry special interests who overruled the FCC’s own experts. The FCC’s own chief economist Tim Brennan called the rules “an economics-free zone.” They should be repealed.”

How do you know they are fake, you may ask. Simple – because the person who wrote them is dead. The person who wrote that quote has been deceased since 2016, yet the date of the comment is from May 30th 2017. In fact, if you go to the address listed, as the journalist from techdirt.com did, you will see that no one else with the same name has lived there since. On top of that, the techdirt.com employee actually found the obituary of the supposed commenter for added evidence.

In any other time period, a federal agency padding their corrupt and special-interest lined agenda with fake support from dead Americans would definitely hit headlines. Unfortunately, we live in a timeline where many heads of our government are very comfortable lying directly to Americans. The FCC is no exception – it has shown no interest in investigating these false public comments. This is just one instance of a long string of dubious actions from the FCC, such as including comments written in random American’s names supporting the attack on Net Neutrality without their permission and the agency’s fabricated DDoS attacks.

Indeed, as you would expect, there is a massive outpour of support FOR Net Neutrality and AGAINST the FCC’s agenda to dismantle it. However, the agency seems to have no problem downplaying the massive public backlash by pointing to these false public comments. All the while, the internet is being served directly to the telecom industry on a silver platter courtesy of Ajit Pai.